The present invention, in some embodiments thereof, relates to systems and methods of cross-domain system engineering and, more specifically, but not exclusively, to system engineering modeling of products and processes whose development, maintenance, improvement and usage utilizes engineering data artifacts spanning across multiple domains.
System engineering is used to model products, parts of products, processes and business process. The complexity of systems, such as cars, airplanes and personal electronic product (e.g. Tablets, smartphones), is growing. The complexity of a system often cannot be comprehended by a single person, and therefore skilled teams are often required for tasks of designing, developing, verifying, testing, maintaining, improving, manufacturing, marketing and selling of products, processes and/or services. The team's skills are often interdisciplinary, spanning across multiple engineering and non-engineering domain such as: hardware, software, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, system architecture, manufacturing, computer-human interaction, industrial design etc. System engineering problem solving, such as verifying requirements fulfillment, design and cost concerns, typically involves multiple disciplines and domains. Each of these domains typically has specialized engineering tools, terminologies, and workflow processes.
Applying each of the above mentioned skills as part of cross-domain system engineering, benefits from a consolidated view of the different domains. A consolidated view contributes to the coherency, reliability and consistency of a system. The consolidated view allows an effect of design modifications in a one domain resonant to the design other related domains within the system. For example, modifying the distance range of a driver seat may affect the requirements for safety testing and compliance with industry regulations. To maintain the range of a car's center of gravity the materials of the driver seat may be modified to lower its weight, which in turn would affect the seat design. In this example the user experience domain affects diverse domains from testing and regulations compliance to industrial design and manufacturing materials.
Attempts to collaborate data across domains include practices such as: 1) Peer-to-peer integration practices 2) Distributed integration systems and 3) Model to model interoperability. According to peer-to-peer integration practices, engineering tools are required to provide interfaces that allow adaption of data to various environments, for example programming SDK APIs or Web-Services. Other practices relate to distributed systems, which leverage relaxed interaction approaches, for example the Representational State Transfer (REST) software architecture style for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web, or Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC). These practices attempt to provide new interaction protocol specifications to formalize basic resources and behaviors of domains. Other practices relate to model to model interoperability. Cross-domain data collaboration and interoperability may further require definition of one or more transformations which map input model resources of one domain to target model resources of another domain. A sample transformation is an Engineering Bill of Material (EBOM) authored in Siemens Team Center Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) environment and transformed to the Manufacturing Bill of Material (MBOM) of a SAP environment (Systems—Applications—Products). Such transformations may be defined by existing industry engineering tools using common standard languages like OMG-QVT. Providing and maintaining content packs of such transformations and mappings require large investments of time and effort by vendors.